The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

This true story about the mother and daughter who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in the 1920s—and how it became the most iconic personality test of our time—is a wild ride! Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers are, alone (and in their relationship with each other), fascinating enough for a compulsively readable biography. Add in Katharine's obsession with the philosophies of Carl Jung (with whom she personally corresponded), both women's drive to improve society through psychoanalysis (though neither had any psychological training), and the enormous popularity the MBTI would gain in the United States and around the world (despite rampant scientific arguments against its merits)…and you've got a humdinger of a tale! Plus, the exploration of the human desire to both individualize and categorize ourselves is extremely thought-provoking. (CH)